
About Dahlia
DAHLIA SCHWEITZER is a pop culture critic, writer, and professor. Described by Vogue as “sexy, rebellious, and cool,” Schweitzer writes about film, television, music, gender, identity, and everything in between. She studied at Wesleyan University, lived and worked in New York City and Berlin, and completed her MA and PhD at the Art Center College of Design and UCLA. She is currently chair of the Film and Media department at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
In addition to her books, Dahlia has essays in publications including Cinema Journal, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Hyperallergic, Jump Cut, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and The Journal of Popular Culture. She has also released several albums of electronic music, including Plastique and Original Pickup.

Professor
As a professor of film and media studies, Dahlia exposes her students to a variety of theoretical approaches and cinematic techniques, asking them to approach both with analytical inquisitiveness. Her aim is to pass her own curiosity on to her students, encouraging them to think across their classes and experiences to create intellectual connections between course materials and the world in which they live. She strives to remind her students that the loudest voice is not necessarily correct, and in so doing, helps them find their own.

Media Critic
Declared “one of the world’s leading analysts of popular culture” by renowned author Toby Miller, Dahlia writes about film, television, music, gender, identity, and everything in between. Her work can be found across mainstream, academic, and emergent channels in both long and short form. Repeatedly drawn to popular culture, Dahlia loves to analyze and unpack cultural artifacts in order to explore how they reflect social and historical issues, as well as looking at how they reinforce or interrogate common cultural assumptions.

Author
Dahlia has written numerous books exploring aspects of film and television. Regardless of the topic—serial killers, private detectives, or even zombies—all of her writing engages directly with questions of self versus other, private versus public space, examining depictions of gender, identity, and race. She traces how these depictions evolve and examines what they mean about our changing world. In her latest project, Dahlia explores the ways haunted homes have become a venue for dramatizing anxieties about family, gender, race, and economic collapse.
Blog
I Am Hated For Who I Am
I thought it would be better when I got back to LA. In some ways, it is. I haven't heard an air raid siren since Saturday. Shrapnel isn't likely to fall from the sky. The concept of war is not as aggressively in my face. I can no longer hear my mother's nightly news blaring from the living room, images of destruction accompanied with political analysis and voiceover. In LA, everything is quiet and sunny and warm. But in some ways, that makes it worse. It's like feeling asleep when you should...
If Only I Could Be So Brave
I grew up in America. My family may have spent summers in Israel, but I grew up American. When I finished high school, it did not cross my mind for a minute whether I should enlist in the Israeli army. Not for one second. So off I went to college. I didn't have to, so why would I? Why would I carry heavy weaponry and sweat through basic training? Why would I get dirty and tired and hungry in a military uniform and bulky combat boots? I loved Israel, sure, but I never felt a burning desire to...
When There Is Nothing Left To Say
My work ethic keeps telling me that a blog post is long overdue. But as much as I try to bring myself to write one, I can't. I'm in Tel Aviv right now, and it's hard to bring myself to go to the beach. It's hard to walk the streets, to shop, to be a tourist, when the fact that the country is at war lurks perpetually in the background. It's not that Israel isn't always at war, in some way, shape, or form, but it's never felt as direct and inescapable to me as it does now, and not merely because...